May 2011

34 Digital Painting and Drawing Tutorials

Nowadays, lots of great Photoshop tutorials appear on the web each week. However, lately I’ve noticed a real decline in the amount of tutorials teaching digital painting and drawing. This is most likely because these tutorials are often more intricate and time consuming to produce. However, any great designer should at least explore the wealth of techniques involved with digital painting. Towards that end, we’ve compiled some great examples of digital painting tutorials to help you master this aspect of Photoshop.

Another month has gone by so quick again, This month as per usually we have been capable of capturing all the best best Photoshop and illustrator tutorials all into on post. I hope you enjoy our monthly wrap up and we would love for you to share with us your favourite article from the roundup.

32 Elegant and Minimalist Icon Packs

Icons are great for adding extra details and professionalism to a website or application. Whilst detailed, bright and colorful icons are great, there is also clearly a market for minimal icons, which can often add a touch of class to your project, and be far more direct for your users. If you’re thinking of integrating a minimal style into your work be sure to check out these great icon sets:

We’re been saying this for a while now—and most authors we’ve interviewed agree—social networks are a great way to get the word out about your items. Especially Twitter.

But how do you do that exactly? We’ve scoured through blogs, forums, and tweets, and come up with a list of 30 ways to use Twitter as a marketing tool. Do you have an idea we haven’t mentioned? Let’s double the list in the comments!

This is a great illustrator quick tip tutorial on how to use one of illustrators most simplest tools. The tutorial is an easy to follow design screen cast and is only few minuets long, and will show you two great techniques which you can implement within your designs.

Phototuts+ is a source of learning on all aspects of photography. We pump out regular tutorials on composition, equipment settings, post-processing, film photography, retouching and much more. If you love photography, you will find a treasure trove of useful advice at Phototuts+.

Members Only Tutorial

This tutorial is available exclusively to our FanExtra members. In order to read the tutorial and download it’s original .psd source file you must sign up as a FanExtra member.

If you sign up today you get access to over 450 design files, including tutorial source files, members only tutorials, vectors, icon packs, texture packs and more! You can also access our huge collection of .psd website interfaces such as this one.

Members Area Tutorial: Design a Grungy Rock Poster Using a Non-Destructive Workflow

Final Image

It is true to say that visitors will look at your navigation menu and will immediately leave your site if you don’t have a clear and directive navigation.

There are 2 types of navigation menu:- horizontal or vertical navigation menu. Horizontal menu has became the mainstream in web design, probably due to the space limitations. This is true especially for blogs or content related websites. Although they may have vertical navigation menu at sidebar, but the primary navigation will be the horizontal menu.

We have a showcase article for navigation menu before, but we would like to focus on some tips, tricks, tutorials and some showcases of horizontal navigation menus here.

Vectorize a Landscape Photo Into a Watercolor Painting

I live in Turin (Italy) and the Mole is the symbol of this city. Rome has Colosseo, London the Big Ben whereas Turin has the Mole. It is a very good subject to use, vectorized, to decorate this city’s merchandising items. A city skyscraper is a must to do as merchandising subject for mug and t-shirt. The image may need several sizes and needs to retain it’s detail so a vector is the most suitable kind of file to use.

Follow this walkthrough on how to turn a landscape photo in an elegant watercolor painting like vector. The procedure, as usual, is just one of the thousand applications that you may found for the same technique. Weíll start by adjusting in a suitable way the photo in Photoshop and we will go ahead to get a sketchy figure skyline, fully detailed vector. For this purpose we will be using Adobe Illustrator.

Mobiletuts+ is Envato’s tutorial site about mobile application development.

Mobiletuts+ is all about quality tutorials for mobile developers – all mobile developers. Topics will include native development with the iPhone, Android, Windows and Blackberry platforms, cross-platform development with tools like Appcelerator and Phone Gap, and techniques for building mobile accessible web sites with HTML 5.

Whether you want to create the next killer app or become a pioneer of the mobile frontier, we’ve got you covered!

Thousands of people can’t imagine their mornings without a cup of coffee. Espresso machines are the best friends of hardly working creative’s around the world. In this Illustrator tutorial I will guide you through the process of creating an espresso maker icon using simple illustration techniques.

Final Image

As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1

Create a new document (1080X1200px).

We’re going to use guides in order to set out our layout. In order to set a guide, go to view>new guide and then specify either horizontal or vertical, as well as a distance for your guide. The default guide setting is in cm, but you can simply type in px.

To start with we’re going to set out our main content area’s width, and so set vertical guides at 90px and 990px. This will mean that we have a 900px wide content area, which is 90px away from each side of your canvas.

Step 2

Now we’re going to lay out the rest of our layout’s guides. These will all be horizontal guides and need to use the following measures:

Calendar is resizable.
You can resize the whole calendar over xml including text size and position of every element, without the need for opening flash files.
Easy to change font (instructions included).

35 Digital Paintings Done the Right Way

Digital paintings have always been a great source of inspiration for me, and the medium has provided some of the most appealing, elegant and vibrant art. Despite technical aids, digital painting takes just as much skill and time as more traditional mediums. In the following round-up we have 35 beautiful and inspiring digital paintings. Each of these works has clearly seen a lot of time invested, and the amount of detail is truly impressive!

Create A Beautiful Samurai Photo Manipulation

In this tutorial we will be creating a samurai inspired piece that combines stock photography with various textures and shapes to create a colorful and dynamic composition. We will also be covering lighting and coloring techniques as well as using Clipping Masks and Adjustment Layers along with a few other useful tricks. If you’re ready to get started then fire up Photoshop and let’s get to it!

For those of you who don’t know MightyDeals provide huge discounts on reputable design services and products. Personally we’re thrilled to be featured, and have decided to offer our annual FanExtra memberships at a massively discounted price of $29 (regular price $69).